Higher education institutions are under increasing pressure to offer interdisciplinary education programmes; however, their implementation is not uncomplicated. Particularly where parts of a programme are delivered by different departments, academic development activities to change practices and develop a coherent interdisciplinary programme are…

Working remotely and collaboratively, our interdisciplinary team created an educational development workshop, "Thinking Skills for the 21st Century: Teaching for Transfer," in which participants not only experience, apply, and reflect on teaching across educational settings but also connect this work to principles that have been…

This chronological overview of the development of interdisciplinary theory starts with the pre-cursors of theory: the development and elaboration of the definition of interdisciplinary studies, influential but problematic images of interdisciplinary studies proposed by Donald Campbell and Erich Jantsch, and best practices in interdisciplinary…

The question of whether neutrality is possible in academic development invites us to explore the particular place of academic development in our institutions and how academic development is positioned in our particular national and institutional environments. This paper, which reports on a small pilot study of how Canadian academic development is…

Romanian scholars, and others, have decried the quality and quantity of scholarly productivity from Romania. However, Romanian scholars face challenges of both tradition and resources as they try to westernize their higher education system. We analyzed data from two sources to compare Romanian scholarly productivity to that of other countries from…

Health care researchers and practitioners are increasingly asked to work across disciplines (or, in keeping with the conference theme, "Between the Tides") to deal with complex health issues. But working with individuals from different fields is more challenging than it sounds. Working across disciplines can result in tension and…

Universities have historically encouraged individual academics with research expertise in a discrete area of study to undertake research and teaching in their discipline. In this process academics have had full autonomy, from the discovery of knowledge, the method used to integrate and interpret it, and the means used to convey it to students and…

This study investigated the effects of learning communities on the educational development of first-year college students at a large, urban, highly selective, research university. These communities, known as "clusters," comprised a year long sequence of theme-oriented courses that were team taught and that included interdisciplinary lectures and…

Papers designed to help build multidisciplinary training networks for rural development are collected in this document, an outgrowth of a regional training workshop attended by participants from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Republic of Korea, Thailand, and India. The six papers deal with the objectives of the workshop which were to:…